O, the cawing and the self-directed cooing. Two recent events on Twitter have breathed new life into the question: At what point does jaunty confidence metastasize into abject bragging?
On Jan. 25, the singer Rod Stewart asked his more-than-155,000 followers, 'Anyone else have a child in each of the last 5 decades?' He then went on to list '60s Sarah/70s Kim/80s Sean, Ruby/90s Renee, Liam/00s Alastair, Aiden' - an act that, in the animal world, would be achieved by puffing up one's chest or by raising the feathers on one's head in a scarifying 'crest erection.'
Meanwhile, Howard Wolfson, a deputy mayor under Michael R. Bloomberg and the former chief press officer for Hillary Rodham Clinton, has been promoting his own personal tweets on Twitter - i.e., paying the social media site to have the tweets appear more prominently in his followers' feeds. When Gawker reported on Mr. Wolfson's auto-largesse, one reader commented, 'It can be oddly soul soothing to click the 'report as spam' button for folks like this.'
The hills resound with the need to be heard. 'People are gaming it a little bit - they're definitely gaming it,' said Charlene Li, an author of 'Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies' and the founder of the business consulting firm the Altimeter Group.
Ms. Li said that the Interactions page on her Twitter account often contains tweets that have been sent @charleneli. When someone tweets 'at' another person like this, the tweet goes out to all of the sender's followers, but, if the tweeted-at person does not follow the sender, the tweet shows up only on the tweeted-at person's not-for-public-view Interactions page. Generally, the tweeter, ever eager to increase his number of followers, is hoping that the tweeted-at individual will retweet his missive, especially if that individual has the high-profile account of someone like Ms. Li, who has 93,000 followers.
'I have no idea who some of these people are,' Ms. Li said. 'I look at their profiles and think, 'Who is this?' Sometimes they're just randomly @replying to a bunch of people. That's not very interesting to me.'
But a random appeal to Twitter royalty is only one of several gambits by which users of the site blur the lines between good and bad manners. Some Twitter users, on seeing that something they've tweeted minutes ago is gaining no traction, will wantonly fire off a spray of retweets or Favorites (similar to the Like option on Facebook) in a desperate attempt to prompt reciprocity.
Some try to curl up in the shade of the In Case You Missed It tree. Andrew Essex, the vice chairman of the advertising agency Droga5, said, 'I've repeatedly used I.C.Y.M.I., which enables one to retweet a self-congratulatory item ad infinitum, with Twitter-sanctioned diplomatic immunity.' Some journalists who are on Twitter will tweet a negative review or article at the subject of that negative review or article, hoping that the subject is either so porous or so absent-minded that he will retweet this bad publicity about himself to his followers.
Not all lapses of Twitter politesse are calculated. The day before the singer-songwriters Sam Amidon and Beth Orton performed at the Varsity Theater in Minneapolis two Octobers ago, Mr. Amidon larkily used Twitter to offer a pair of free tickets to R. T. Ryback, who was then the city's mayor. Mr. Amidon had met Mr. Ryback a year earlier when he had performed in Minneapolis with the composer Nico Muhly.
Mr. Amidon said: 'Shortly thereafter my manager got an official correspondence from the mayor's office saying that the mayor had tried to Direct Message me, but since I'm not following him on Twitter, it wouldn't work. Oops!' (Direct Messages work only when the recipient is following the sender.) Asked how he felt about the incident, Mr. Amidon said, 'Shamed.'
There's no accounting for taste. It would be difficult to determine a universal percentage of allowable self-promotional tweets (one in 10? one in a million?) because tone and the nature of the Twitter feed itself would play a large part in such an algorithm. Todd Gloria, the interim mayor of San Diego and the president of the City Council, said: 'It also probably depends on the level of accomplishment. If you won the silent auction at an event, that's not very interesting. But if you won the Nobel Peace Prize, by all means, knock yourself out: You can get a couple of tweets out of that.'
But if there's no algorithm for determining when self-promotion has crossed the line, are there any general principles to be considered? Two come to mind. First, self-promotion becomes unseemly when it is viewed as repetitive. Your followers probably are willing to tolerate two or three newspaper reviews of your new monograph about combat ethics of the Boer Wars, but not 17.
Second, readers are turned off when they're made more aware of a tweet's strategy than its content. We were so wowed by the fact that you're sending the tweet to @madonna and @GwynethPaltrow and @RinglingBros that we lost the fact that you just secured your first booking as a yoga clown.
Ms. Li suggested a third metric: usefulness. 'Your content has to be useful to people,' she said. 'If it doesn't have value to your followers, then it's seen as spam or self-promotion.' Under this guideline, Rod Stewart's tweet about having a child from each decade would seem to justify its swagger, because it's information that his fans can share with others, or perhaps bait their grandparents with.
But a tweet like one from the film critic Bill Goodykoontz that runs: 'I never anticipated having the sort of job where I would be on the phone with someone and say: 'I have to go. Ang Lee is on the other line' ' would probably not. Yes, Mr. Goodykoontz's readers can infer that the critic will soon be writing about Mr. Lee, but the lack of specificity renders the communiqué more tease than promise.
On Twitter, inimitable and brazen expressions of opinion and self-esteem are the coin of the realm; thus, the metric of usefulness may indeed be helpful when entering this particular crowded barroom. However, that said, it's also important to note that the loveliest interactions one has on social media are those in which two people are drawn to each other not because of what they can do for each other. It's lovely when the connection is a shared topic of interest. It's lovely when the connection is a shared sensibility.
It's even lovely when the connection is slightly random. The actor Robert Stanton said: 'Just yesterday I tweeted to Vladimir Putin's official English language account, 'The fish rots from the head' in Russian, more out of anger toward his policy of silencing and oppressing gay people than a desire to be retweeted. I deleted the tweet almost immediately, because I imagine he kills people he doesn't like, or at least steals their rings. But I didn't delete it quickly enough not to pick up a follower, a Russian woman who tweets 140 Cyrillic characters. An accidental follower. She is 'waiting for love.' '
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